Updated September 2026
These two terms both describe how a piece of land's boundary is legally defined, but they're different systems — and knowing which one applies to a given property changes how you'd research or verify it.
A metes and bounds description defines a parcel's boundary as a written sequence of bearings and distances ("calls") starting from a point of beginning and returning to it — the format this tool plots. It's the oldest boundary-description method still in active use in the United States, inherited directly from English common law surveying practice, and it remains the standard method in the original thirteen colonies and other states that predate (or opted out of) the federal rectangular survey system — much of the original East Coast, and rural land nationwide that was subdivided informally over time rather than platted as a subdivision. A metes and bounds description exists purely as text in a deed; there's no guarantee a drawn map of it was ever filed anywhere, which is exactly the gap this tool is built to fill — turning the text into a picture without needing to hire a surveyor just to visualize it.
A plat map (or subdivision plat) is a drawn, surveyed map — prepared and stamped by a licensed surveyor, filed with the county recorder or register of deeds, and typically covering an entire subdivision at once rather than one parcel. Once a plat is recorded, individual lots within it are usually described far more simply than a full metes and bounds recitation — a legal description might just read "Lot 14, Block 3, Fairview Estates Subdivision, as recorded in Plat Book 22, Page 87" — because all the actual bearings and distances already exist on the recorded plat drawing and don't need repeating in every deed. Plat maps are the norm for anything built as a planned subdivision: suburban developments, platted city lots, and most 20th-century residential construction.
Worth mentioning because it's easy to confuse with the other two: most of the U.S. outside the original colonies (roughly the Midwest, West, and much of the South) uses the federal Public Land Survey System — townships, ranges, sections, and fractional descriptions like "the NE¼ of the SW¼ of Section 14, Township 3 North, Range 2 West." That system describes location using a fixed nationwide grid rather than calls from a local point of beginning, and it's not what this tool is built for — though it's common for a PLSS-described parcel to still get a follow-up metes and bounds description if it was later subdivided into an irregular shape that doesn't fit neatly on the section grid.
It's common, especially for older or rural parcels, to have a legal description that's metes and bounds even though a plat-style subdivision surrounds it, or for a metes and bounds parcel to later get its own recorded survey plat once it's sold, subdivided, or used as loan collateral requiring a current survey. The two systems aren't mutually exclusive — metes and bounds is a description format, while a plat is a recorded drawing; a surveyor can always draw a plat of a metes and bounds description (that's essentially what a boundary survey does), and it's exactly what this tool does informally and instantly, without the cost or turnaround of hiring a surveyor for a rough first look.
This tool is useful for understanding what a metes and bounds description describes, sanity-checking that it closes, and getting a rough sense of shape, size, and orientation before you decide whether something's worth pursuing further — a title researcher scanning a chain of title, a landowner curious what an old deed actually describes, or a buyer trying to visualize a rural parcel before a formal survey is ordered. It is not a substitute for an actual recorded plat or a licensed surveyor's boundary survey for anything with legal or financial weight — a real estate closing, a boundary dispute, a construction setback question, or a mortgage requiring title insurance all require the real, monumented, professionally surveyed version, not a browser sketch.